Meet You At The Delta
by LittleLongHairedOutlaw
Summary: She might have kissed him at any time in ten years of knowing him, but she kisses him now, and the past and future stretch before them. Western AU. Christine/Daroga. Christine/Erik/Daroga


**A/N: The first part of this was written because wheel-of-fish sent me the prompt "Things you said when you were drunk" for Charoga. The rest happened because after I filled the prompt I couldn't stop thinking about it. Dedicated to Bogglocity. Named thanks to 'Delta' by Mumford & Sons.**

**Warnings for references to alcohol, major illness, and miscarriage.**

**If you enjoy this fic (and I hope you do, of my 3 western AUs this is the one I'm proudest of) please do review!**

* * *

The first time it happens is November, 1887. The sky slate-grey over the mountains, first snow a scattering of dark flakes framed against it. Neither of them has slept more than a handful of snatches of broken sleep for more than six weeks, but their reason for staying awake lies newly-buried beneath the frost.

It could have happened a hundred times before, in a dozen different places. Leadville. Prescott. Globe. Las Vegas, New Mexico. Stretching back in a trail of alleged cures and improvements (not mountain air nor dry heat nor hot springs can make a difference to something rooted deep in your lungs) to Dodge, 1877. An altercation broken up by a pianist always slightly too close to the wrong side of the law.

Ten years later is Glenwood, and the gap newly torn between them is a gulf neither can cross.

There is a bottle of whiskey. And there is a kiss. A sweet kiss, the brushing of tongues, her body pressed close to his. He rides out first thing in the morning. That evening, she cuts her hair and dons a suit and vows to play Chopin's mazurkas on every piano in every town she can find. Even if it means crossing the law Emir always defended.

Erik always favored the mazurkas. She thinks, maybe, it is because Chopin, too, felt death in himself as he composed.

(Erik died, and Emir left her. And both of those were things she knew someday would happen.)

It is six months later, in Cheyenne, that they find each other again. Emir has grown gaunt, tired and ragged from living alone in the wilderness, but the smile that he gives her when he recognizes her behind her men's clothes lights up his face.

"Christine."

And the thing that's lived within her since the morning she woke to find him gone catches all her words in her throat.

She reaches across the table, and kisses him.

And maybe it's the whiskey, or maybe it's the loneliness, or maybe it's the fact they're grieving the same man who they loved together for ten years and who choked to death on his own blood in their arms, but she kisses him and tastes salt on his lips and whispers, "Don't ever leave me like that again."

His lips twitch against hers, speak silently of mezcal and tequila. "I'll do my best."

* * *

It started in Dodge, a place where things are wont to either start or end, and frequently it is lives, and the latter. But it started in Dodge and even now the details of what happened that night are hazy.

She was only there three weeks, still new to saloons and dance halls, and someone had grabbed her. She never saw his face, but she heard his threats and they are deep in her bones. She shivered, struggled, and as she wondered about trying to reach the knife Sorelli told her to always keep in her boot (or the one strapped to her thigh, or the one down in her other boot) her assailant was pulled off her. The saloon was quiet, only the drunk piano player and the bartender, and as she turned around it was the piano player, tall and thin and dark, she saw wrestling her attacker to the door.

"Don't ever touch a lady like that again." And he kicked the man into the street.

She stood there, dazed, trying to get her bearings, and in a moment the piano player was back at her side, settling her on the bench, pouring her a glass of whiskey from his own bottle, dabbing the tears from her eyes with a handkerchief produced from his pocket. She could only see half of his face, the other half covered with a tattered mask, but his eyes shone soft hazel as he lowered himself onto the bench beside her, one of his hands reaching past to settle on the keys.

"I suggest you drink that slowly to steady yourself, Miss…" he trailed off, the eyebrow she could see raised expectantly, so she mustered herself and whispered,

"Christine."

"Miss Christine." A slight twitch of a smile from his good lip. "You may call me Erik."

And the music that swirled around her, tapped out by his fingers, was the most beautiful thing she'd ever heard.

* * *

They were still at the piano when Emir found them. Erik was explaining the notes to her, her hands resting on the backs of his as he pressed each one. "It's the easiest way to feel them out," he said, giving that slight smile with the exposed half of his mouth. And then, in a beat, he straightened up and raised his voice and said, "you should keep that class of people out of your town."

She turned around at the snort that came from behind them, and found they were being watched by the deputy marshal, a fond smile twitching at his lips, eyes shining emerald green, and some unnameable fluttered inside her.

"I would appreciate if you didn't threaten people with knives, Erik," but there was a lightness to his tone that belied his words.

And that is how she met Emir.

* * *

They leave Cheyenne together that night, and lie beneath the stars. Emir is warm beside her, one arm around her, and as they press themselves close together she longs for Erik, longs for him to join them the way he always did.

It is an unspeakable thing, and Emir's lips are gentle kissing her eyelids.

"I miss him too," he whispers.

* * *

How they fell together she will never understand. It is a thing that happened when winter came to Dodge and the town fell quiet, Emir relieved of his deputy duties. She already knew he shared Erik's bed. Erik confessed it to her the first night he shared hers, after one of her piano lessons. But that late October, Emir snatched her wrist, and asked her to join them in their rooms.

"There is a cold in Erik's chest," he whispered, "and we would each like it if you came."

Erik's illness was the great unspoken, but she always understood it for what it was, and how it would someday take him from them. That night he smiled at her as she entered the room where he lay, and she bent down to kiss the distorted half of his face.

"Emir told me he invited you," he murmured, and his lips tasted of iron and salt beneath her own.

"It was my pleasure to come," she breathed, and eased herself down beside him.

* * *

The arrangement was an easy one. On select nights she would lie with Erik, while on other nights Emir would lie with him. And other nights they would all three lie together, Erik between the two of them, and he would kiss them both, and their arms would encircle him, and Emir's smile for her was always soft.

When she fell in love with him, too, she will never know.

* * *

The third time she kisses Emir, dawn has barely broken. He is sleeping beside her, the lines of worry and grief Erik etched into his face smoothed away. She cards her fingers through his hair, peppered with grey where once it was black, and kisses him gently, carefully, on the lips. His lips stir only slightly beneath hers, and she wraps the blankets tighter around them both.

* * *

In New Mexico Erik killed a man.

Emir was in bed, delirious with the fever of an infected wound. She sat at his side and stilled his wandering fingers and kissed his forehead and dabbed the sweat from his face. The shot echoed through the room from the street below, and Emir cried out, eyes flying open, tears trickling down his cheeks. She clenched his fingers tighter and dabbed the tears away and sang to him a lullaby her father once sang to her when she was the tiniest of little girls, and when Emir's gasps and whimpers finally eased into sleep, she looked out to see what the commotion was.

Erik had shot the man who had almost taken Emir from them.

There might have been a hanging, but she gave Emir enough laudanum to keep him asleep, and stole a horse, seduced the sheriff who really just wanted a softer pair of hands to hold him, and stole the key to Erik's cell. He was pale and blood-stained, eyes red-rimmed, and as the cuffs fell from his wrists he kissed her.

"Get somewhere safe," she whispered, "and we'll find you when he's well."

No ifs, or buts, or maybes. Emir would get well and Erik would stay as well as he could, and they would find him just as soon as time allowed.

"Be careful," he whispered, and with a last kiss he ran.

It was the last they saw of him for three months.

(When Emir's fever broke the night after the escape, his first question was for Erik, and she held him as he cried.)

* * *

She kisses, now, that scar on Emir's chest from that bullet that almost killed him. He whimpers beneath her, and the tears in his eyes reflect the stars above.

* * *

In Tucson she lost a baby.

She had not known she was expecting. It was too early for such certainties. All she did know was that Erik was sleeping after the worst haemorrhage she'd seen, his face so pale and gaunt it was as if he were dead. Morphine and codeine were all the doctor could do for him, the instructions that he was only permitted beef tea, to prop him up if he started to cough, and that he must not under any circumstances be excited.

The second haemorrhage came anyway.

As he gagged and choked and Emir ran for the doctor, she held him in her arms and the pain lanced through her back. She bit her lip to keep from crying out and tasted blood as the pain came sharp again. The world faded to grey and Erik grabbed for her and for a long time she was only dimly aware of voices.

It was Emir who told her when she woke, and held her as Erik lay shivering and unconscious beside her, and together they cried for what they knew would never be.

* * *

She realises it herself, the second time she is with child.

It is a year since Erik's death. A year since she and Emir first kissed. Six months since he returned. She confides her suspicions in the doctor, who confirms it to her, and her heart wrenches as she looks upon the man she presents to the world as her husband, to think of who is missing.

The words catch in her throat, too sacred to speak after all they've been through, and she tells him the news by whispering of eight years ago in Tucson, and laying his hand on her belly.

His eyes well with tears, and she kisses them away.

* * *

Through a series of unfortunate events (including another man shot dead — this time for attempting to interfere with her — and a second escape from a town's jail) they were forced to ride through most of Utah in the summer of 1882.

Her saddlebags were packed with whiskey, with liniment and laudanum and a very small, very precious, bottle of morphine. Which was a good thing, because they were still a week from the border and safety when Erik cried out one evening and slipped from his horse into the dust.

The blood he coughed up was bright red. Arterial.

She pretended that she could not feel death in the air, could not see it in his blood.

She learned long ago to pretend about many things. And most of them were about Erik's health.

(Also their marital status, and as the occasion demanded she might be married to him or might be married to Emir or might be married to neither but that wasn't pretending, that was how things were.)

They settled him beneath the shade of a big tree, half-propped with his saddle behind him, and as she rubbed the liniment into his chest and dabbed the blood from his lips, Emir rode hard for the nearest ranch.

She held Erik close all that night as he drifted in and out of consciousness, whispered to him and sang his own songs back to him, softer and sweeter beneath the stars.

By morning Emir was back with a buckboard and two ranch hands. They got Erik to the house and got him settled in the guest room and all she could think as he slept and Emir kept a vigil at the window was how dangerous it was, how easy it would be to find him.

That night they roused him, and though it was undoubtedly a risk they settled him on her horse. She climbed up behind him and with his head on her shoulder and Emir leading them and Erik's horse both from his own saddle, they rode carefully for the border.

The bleeding never restarted.

Two weeks later they were safely out of Utah.

* * *

She hides her growing belly beneath Emir's too-big shirts, plays piano in saloons and dance halls as he plays cards. There is a cavalry captain she recognizes maybe from Tucson or maybe from Denver or maybe from anywhere in between and he pays her to keep playing the love songs that Erik composed and she learned by ear.

"You have a marvellous memory for music." His words prick something deep inside, and for a moment it is Erik whispering them in her ear, Erik standing before her.

She blinks and the vision vanishes and it is still the blond captain, smiling politely.

She smiles back at him. "I've been told that before."

Afterwards she lies in Emir's arms, and wrapped safe beneath the blankets, looking up at the ceiling of their little room, he whispers, "I think we should go back to Glenwood."

* * *

She slipped only once, in ten years of loving Erik with Emir. Only once, and it was in Deadwood. There was a dance hall ballerina, and banks of snow. Erik was recovering from being ill again, such as it was within his ability to recover, (spring 1885, and there was not much recovering left in him), and she was just so tired. Tired of his illness, tired of seeing him getting worse and worse only to recover by increments before getting worse again, tired of convincing him to rest when all he wanted was to play every piano he came within touching distance of. She was tired of the whole world, and it was the most beautiful ballerina with elegantly carved legs and delicate breasts.

She took her to bed and there they passed one of the most precious nights of her life.

When morning came she was sick with guilt over what she had done, sick over her betrayal of Erik, and when she went back to his side it was Emir who she saw first.

"You deserve all the love the world can give you," he whispered as he hugged her. "He would never begrudge you a moment of it."

(She will meet the ballerina again. But it will be in some little town with barely a name fifty miles from Cheyenne. They will spend a pleasant night together but she will not feel guilty over abandoning Erik, because Erik will be already dead.)

* * *

For reasons best left undiscussed, it would be foolhardy of her to ever pass within 100 miles of Helena again. (Erik, coughing blood into the dirt, gasping, his mask ripped away. The man who attacked him dead with her knife between his ribs. Emir, already figuring out how they will escape this time.) Yet the longing to go back fills her every night as they journey to Glenwood. Maybe it is because there she took the first life she ever took. Maybe it is because there is some part of Erik lingering ground into the dust. Likely, it is because there was one of the last times he was well. Until he wasn't.

Or maybe it is that being with child is causing her to dwell on the past.

(Neither of them have spoken of names. To speak of names is to assume there will be something to wear it, and assumptions invite trouble.)

Her bones cry out to be back to Helena, and Emir kisses the swell of her belly by the firelight, massages the cramps that come into her back, brings her pleasure with his fingertips and lips until she cries out into the darkness and he kisses her and swears he will never leave her.

"I'm going to love you enough for the two of us," he whispers, and the memory of his words, of his face in this exact moment, framed by the moon above, will live forever in her heart.

* * *

He dealt cards and played the piano and taught her to shoot with a deadly aim and how to throw a knife to kill a man. He asked her to sing to accompany him and asked her to play for him and kissed her as their fingers danced together along the keys. He held her in his arms as they swayed to the music, and whiskey was raw and edged with iron off his lips. His fingers were gentle skimming her inner thigh and his kisses left trails of scarlet along her bosom and he slept with one arm around her and one arm around Emir and never rested enough.

He taught her to learn music from hearing it played through twice, how to remember notes without seeing them written down. He told her she would have been a concert pianist if she were a man, and teased her that maybe they should cut her hair and dress her in men's clothes.

He made love to her beneath the stars, beneath the sun. In long grass and on a bed of sand and in small rooms in little boarding houses.

He laughed too loud and cried over little things and bore great things in silence and rode horses too fast and almost got himself killed when he was thrown in a quarter-mile race and won three thousand dollars in a game of chess that lasted all night and had him ash-pale by the end of it.

He cried when she told him of the baby that might have been, and refused for months to touch her in anything other than the chastest of ways (even when he was well enough again) for fear of hurting her.

He danced with Emir in empty rooms as she played for them, waltzes and Beethoven's Emperor and nocturnes and his beloved mazurkas and soft little things he wove himself. He kissed Emir beneath the light of a full moon and kissed her beneath the stars and kissed them both whenever he felt like it.

He whispered of Mexico, of Canada, swore his love to her in ten different languages.

He wore black suits and sometimes fine dove-grey, and Emir favoured blues and greens and golds to bring out his eyes, and the effect of one particular shirt was so great that something stirred within her and Erik led him straight back to bed.

(She attended to her own desires, and, not for the first time, wondered what it would be like to love the two of them.)

She loved him to the moon and back and loved him all the more for how he loved Emir.

His eyes shone brighter than the sun.

Every time she plays, she wears that shade of gold.

His rings are precious weights on her fingers.

Emir wears his pocket watch, pressed close to his heart.

* * *

She held his hands as Emir sketched them, and his grip was surprisingly strong, even then, three months before he died.

The last time he rose from bed, in a brief interlude between a bout of pneumonia and the series of haemorrhages that would kill him, he leaned against the wall at the window for a long time, and lamented breathlessly that he could not make it as far as a piano.

She sang the notes to him as tears trickled down his cheeks.

He joined her hands to Emir's and kissed them both on the lips, first one and then the other, and then their joined hands and breathed, "take care of each other when I'm gone."

Emir turned away to hide the tears on his face, and she squeezed his fingers a little tighter.

The last time Erik opened his eyes, at dusk, fifteen hours before his heart failed in its beating, they were heavy with tiredness but clearer than they had been in days. His lips twitched into what might have been a smile if he had had the strength, and though he was too weak to speak there was no need for words.

They kissed him, and held him as his eyes slipped closed, and each knew, deep down, it would be for the last time.

* * *

The six months between Erik's death (her first kiss with Emir) and Emir's return (her second kiss with Emir) are the single worst six months of her life. She plays every piano she can find, and cries to remember Erik's comment of there being a little banjo in the tone as she plays Chopin on a Chickering Square Grand. The memory is seven years old, the piano it was made about lost in the great Tombstone fire of 1881, but she hears it in her ear as clear as if he is sitting beside her, and Emir's answer of, "You were always fond of the banjo."

She drinks and plays pianos and sleeps beneath the stars and kills a man who will never be traced up to her account. And as Emir will never speak of the six months he spent wandering alone, so she will never tell him of her six months. They will lie in each other's arms, close together with a world of space between them where Erik used to lie, and half a year will be but an intermission.

"I promise I'm going to love you for the rest of your life," he will whisper into her ear, and she will kiss him and whisper, "I promise I'm going to love you for the rest of yours."

* * *

The baby comes on a cool day in April. His features are perfect, his lungs healthy as he cries out, his dark skin not so dark as his father's, tempered by his mother's pale complexion. His father's tears are the first to fall on his face. His mother's voice is the first to sing a soft lullaby. Somewhere down the street, Chopin is being played on a Chickering Square Grand.

His mother holds him close, and kisses his soft forehead, and names him for the man who might have been his father, in another world.

* * *

Glenwood, 1889. The sky slate-grey over the mountains. The first flakes of snow dark framed against it. A woman and a man at the edge of a grave, hands linked, son cradled in her arms. And beneath them lies the bones of the one who brought them together.

The kiss they share is sweet. No desperation, no grief. It is what it is, and what it is is theirs.


End file.
